Boulder Valley is considering closing Boulder’s Douglass Elementary, Mesa Elementary and Flatirons Elementary and Broomfield’s Birch Elementary in response to declining enrollment, according to a plan presented by school district leaders at a Tuesday work session.
The plan also includes reconfiguring Monarch PK-8 in Louisville and Eldorado PK-8 in Superior. Monarch would become a middle school only, while Eldorado would become an elementary school only. And two south Boulder focus, or magnet schools, would be relocated.
Altogether, including relocations and schools where students would be reassigned, 16 schools would be impacted by the proposal. The closures are expected to reduce the district’s excess elementary school capacity from 37% to 32%, as well as to save up to $4 million a year the district has promised to invest in smaller class sizes and adding school support staff members.
On the expense side, one-time school transition support is budgeted at $5 million, while it’s expected to cost between $7.5 million and $10 million to make needed building modifications.
Around 1,000 people tuned in to watch the livestream of the work session, which didn’t include an opportunity for public comment. The school board will hear from the community and discuss the draft plan at its Sept. 8 and 22 meetings. The board is scheduled to vote at the Sept. 22 meeting. Any changes will go into effect in the fall of 2027.
“It is definitely a change in the right direction … these maneuvers really do set us up, set the district up, for success to continue to be able to evolve and adapt, be resilient meeting the needs of our students with our facilities,” school board President Nicole Rajpal said. “All of these changes are hard. They are a lot to process. And looking at the (presentation) slides, we could have done more. We chose not to because we listened.”
The district focused on solutions for schools in three regions: Boulder; Louisville and Superior; and Broomfield. Not included were mountain schools, schools in Erie and Lafayette, charter schools, and dual-language bilingual schools. District leaders said they plan to spend the next year reviewing the dual-language elementary and middle schools, located in Boulder and Lafayette, before making a recommendation for improvements.
In Boulder, leaders made three separate proposals for changes.
For the first proposal, the district would close Douglass Elementary east of Boulder and redraw the attendance boundaries so students would be divided among Coal Creek, Eisenhower and Heatherwood elementary schools.
South Boulder’s High Peaks Elementary, a focus school, would be relocated to the Douglass building that’s located on 75th Street — a move district leaders said would increase accessibility to its choice schools, which have been concentrated in south Boulder. The district then would close Community Montessori’s building at 805 Gillaspie Drive in the Table Mesa neighborhood.
Community Montessori, another focus school, would relocate to the “Aurora 7” building that now houses both High Peaks and Boulder Community School of Integrated Studies at 3995 Aurora Ave., also in south Boulder. That would leave the Community Montessori building, originally constructed in 1960 as Paddock Elementary, empty.
For the second proposal, south Boulder’s Mesa Elementary School would be closed and the students merged into Bear Creek Elementary. The two schools are less than a mile apart. The combined school is expected to enroll up to 445 students, pushing it to up to 90% of capacity.
For the third proposal, Flatirons Elementary, at 1150 Seventh St., would be closed and its students divided between Foothill and Whittier elementary schools. Last school year, Flatirons was the district’s smallest neighborhood school, with 151 students. The school was at 47% capacity, and most grades also only had one round, or class, per grade level. The proposal also preserves Whittier’s historic building. Opened in Boulder in 1882, Whittier claims the title of Colorado’s oldest operating public school building in continuous use.
In Louisville and Superior, district leaders said they don’t have enough students to support six elementary schools and three middle schools. But, they said, it didn’t make sense to close one of the standalone elementary schools, given their locations and enrollment numbers. Instead, they decided to convert the PK-8s into standalone elementary and middle schools.
Monarch’s elementary students would be assigned to Fireside, Superior and Eldorado elementary schools, while Monarch would absorb Eldorado’s middle school students. After the change, Monarch is expected to enroll around 500 middle school students. Eldorado is expected to enroll between around 350 elementary students.
In Broomfield, Birch Elementary would close and the students would be merged into Kohl Elementary. The two schools are located about 1.6 miles apart.
Birch was chosen to close mainly because Kohl has a larger building capacity, about a 420-student capacity at Birch compared to about a 540-student capacity at Kohl, according to district leaders. Birch also has a lower projected enrollment, with about 200 students expected in five years. The combined school is projected to enroll around 450 students.
District leaders said they will develop recommendations on what to do with the four closed buildings after the proposed changes are approved by the school board, according to district leaders.
The draft plan was developed over the summer using through community engagement sessions, teacher roundtables and an online survey. Staff members analyzed enrollment trends, building capacity, facility conditions and long-term student needs as they weighed the potential consequences and possibilities. They also consolidated schools where possible because that was the option that received the most support, according to district leaders.
Goals include making big enough changes now so more changes aren’t needed in the next five to 10 years, as well as allowing the district to save enough money to make the improvements the community wants to see at existing schools. Those requested improvements include lower class sizes; fewer multi-grade classes; and more support staff, such as math and literacy interventionists and specials (art, music and P.E.) teachers.
“By acting now, by acting today, the dollars that we recover we can reinvest in schools,” Superintendent Rob Anderson said.
Closures and other changes are needed, district leaders said, because projections show a loss of 1,700 students in the next five years — for a total decline of more than 5,000 students since 2017. They said reasons for the drop include lower birth rates, an aging population, the high cost of living, low housing inventory and more affordable housing opportunities in surrounding districts.
The result is under-enrolled schools, especially at the elementary level. Not including charter schools, the school district has the capacity to serve 14,543 K-5 students but currently serves just 9,732 K-5 students. That means there are 4,811 open seats, with an elementary utilization rate of 67%. Projections show 5,110 open seats, for a 65% elementary utilization rate, in five years.
District leaders said they could have closed additional schools in Boulder, based on enrollment numbers. Boulder has 16 non-charter elementary schools, they said, but the city’s resident student population only supports 10 elementary schools with three classes per grade level.
“Really what this came down to was maintaining geographic distribution of our neighborhood schools throughout the district … we felt like it was best to serve our families by leaving some schools where they’re at and having excess capacity,” Boulder Valley Assistant Superintendent of Operations Rob Price said.
